The steering systems of highway motor vehicles and the like are designed primarily for driver control. In these systems, the steering force required on the steering wheel and the ratio between steering wheel movement and movement of the steered ground wheels (steer wheels) depend upon the characteristics of the particular vehicle and the conditions under which it will usually be operated. A wide variety of extraneous forces can act on a vehicle steering system and spurious steering inputs caused by these forces must be dealt with satisfactorily in order to provide stable and controllable steering of a vehicle. As vehicle speed increases, the effects of any spurious steering inputs are magnified, making it necessary for the driver to exercise more precise and careful driving control.
In the past, motor vehicle steering systems have provided some steering wheel returnability by slanting the king pins of the steer wheels so that their top ends are aft of their bottom ends. This is referred to as a positive king pin angle and produces a turning-lift effect that provides some steering wheel returnability as explained further below. The use of positive king pin angles involves compromises over the full steering spectrum because it results in positive caster offset and thereby produces castering of the steer wheels. For example, the adverse effects of strong gusty cross winds are more pronounced with large amounts of positive caster offset. As its name would imply, the vehicle tends to caster towards the side of the roadway to which it is being pushed by the wind. Thus, the adverse steering inputs caused by crosswinds are directly related to the amount of positive king pin angle, which is a classic example of having to balance a benefit with a detriment.
Any small amount of stability gained on a non-windy day from slanting the steer wheel king pins may be paid for many times over when driving in a crosswind because of the destabilizing castering effect of the crosswind. Similarly, a high crown at the center of the roadway or a slanted roadway tends to cause vehicles with castered steer wheels to turn toward the edge of the roadway, that is, in the downhill direction. Castered steer wheels also allow steering inputs from rutted and other imperfect roadway surfaces to steer back against the driver and thereby cause road wander, which is a universal driving complaint, particularly by driver's of heavy vehicles such as trucks and motor homes. In addition, due to increased turning-lift effects, generous positive king pin angles provide significant resistance to small radius turns, which can make city driving quite fatiguing. These adverse effects are some of the negative aspects of attempting to achieve steering system stability through generous amounts of positive king pin angle.
Another drawback of prior art steering systems is that spurious inputs transmitted from the roadway through the steer wheels affect substantially the entire steering assembly before encountering any stabilizing resistance from the steering wheel. The transmission of these inputs between the steer wheels and the steering wheel causes the interconnecting components of the steering system to repeatedly oscillate between states of tension and compression. Such oscillations cause wear and slack in ball joints and other connections and have long been considered a primary source of stress fatigue which can lead to premature failure of various steering system components. Mechanical slack due to worn parts can also be a cause of steering system oscillations and vehicle wandering that require constant corrections and therefore produce driver fatigue.
For lack of a more advanced method, slanting of the steer wheel king pin has been accepted by the industry in the past as a low-cost method of achieving steer wheel returnability. Accordingly, many over-the-road vehicles are provided with generous amounts of positive caster offset. Not much thought has been given by others to the self-defeating side effects of steer wheel castering. Keeping a vehicle tracking straight and under control currently requires an inordinate amount of driver steering corrections to counteract the adverse side effects of castered steer wheels. The repetitive task of making numerous precise steering corrections mile after mile weighs heavily on a driver's physical and mental well-being, and may result in extreme driving fatigue. Thus, a highly important consideration that has long been overlooked by the industry is that steer wheel castering is directly responsible for road wander, crowned road steering wheel pull and cross wind steering problems. The failure of the industry to recognize the critical need to provide directional stability by replacing slanting of the king pins with another method of achieving steer wheel returnability may go down in history as one of the longest enduring vehicle design oversights.
My Precision Steer Wheel Control Technology (PSWCT) has brought to light incorrect technical assumptions that have been responsible for this long-standing major vehicle design oversight, which has in effect been responsible for a lack of heavy vehicle directional stability and related highway safety issues. The heavy vehicle industry has made amazing progress in advancing the state of the art in heavy vehicle design with the exception of recognizing the critical need for directional stability. For over a half a century, the driving of heavy vehicles that are lacking in directional stability has required an inordinate amount of corrective driver steering to keep the vehicle going straight and under control. To be directionally stable, a vehicle's steering system must be designed so that the steer wheels track exceptionally straight without requiring repetitive driver steering corrections to keep the vehicle under directional control, thereby greatly reducing the driver work-load. It has been shown that the industry-wide method of slanting the king pins of the steer wheels to achieve steering wheel returnability is the major cause of the unstable behavior of the steer wheels, which results in driver fatigue and a surprising number of other drivability and operational problems.
While this low-cost simple method of achieving steering wheel returnability is desirable from a manufacturing point of view, the resultant operational problems are very undesirable to the consumers, especially to the heavy vehicle drivers who must endure the million upon millions of miles that are many times more fatiguing to drive than they would be in a directionally stable vehicle that is not adversely affected by crosswinds. Historians will find it hard to rationalize how the hundred-year-old method of achieving steering wheel returnability by the “turning-lift effect” could have been used for so long, without steer wheel castering problems being recognized for their negative effect on heavy vehicle drivability. It was not for the lack of consumer complaints about the repetitive steering corrections required to maintain directional control in spite of road wander and steering wheel pull, about crosswind driving fatigue, and about the cost of accelerated steer wheel tire wear.
In fairness to the presently very capable heavy vehicle design community, the industry-wide endorsement of the long standing heavy vehicle steering and control methodology was established before their time, and had been universally accepted throughout the heavy vehicle industry as a cost-effective method of dealing with heavy vehicle steering requirements. Because the consumers' only choice has been to accept the lack of heavy vehicle directional stability and the related drivability problems as normal, other more pressing problems that the consumers were aware of were given priority over advancing the state of the art in heavy vehicle drivability.
Castering and the turning-lift effect may be further explained as follows with reference to FIGS. 1 to 3. In the beginning when the horseless carriage first took to the road, uncomplicated simple technology was of great importance. As a product improvement, the steering tiller initially was traded for a steering wheel that presented a problem because the steering wheel would stay turned after turning a corner. The lack of steering wheel returnability was solved by the simple method of slanting the pivot axis 15 of a steer wheel king pin 12 aft at the top end to accomplish a turning-lift effect created when the steer wheel 13 was turned to the aft side of the slanted king pin, thereby lifting the vehicle by a small amount as illustrated in prior art FIG. 1 by the broken line 14, which shows a turned position of steer wheel 13. When the vehicle driver releases the steering wheel after turning, the weight of the vehicle causes the steer wheel that lifted the vehicle to return toward the lower most on-center driving position represented by the solid line wheel in FIG. 1. Because the steer wheels are connected by a tie rod, both wheels are made to return toward the on-center, straight ahead driving position.
To better understand the turning-lift effect, a graphic example that almost everyone is familiar with is the post of a farm gate that becomes slanted with the passage of time due to the weight of the gate in its closed position. When the gate 10 is opened in either direction, the low end of the gate is lifted by turning it toward a non-slanting side of the post 19 on hinges 11,11, creating a turning lift effect as illustrated in prior art FIG. 2 by the broken line 21, which shows a turned position of gate 10. When the gate is released, its weight will cause it to swing back toward the lower closed position represented by the solid line gate in FIG. 2. On either side near the gate's closed position, the turning-lift effect diminishes and becomes almost neutral such that its weight alone is not able to hold the gate in the fully closed position, requiring a suitable latch mechanism to keep it fully closed. In a similar manner to the turning lift of the farm gate, when the steer wheels of a vehicle return toward their lowermost on-center, straight ahead position, the turning-lift effect also diminishes and does not have enough centering force to keep the steer wheels tracking straight in the on-center driving position. Therefore, the unstable behavior of the steer wheels near the on-center position requires that they be constantly controlled by corrective driver steering input.
The inherent lack of steer wheel directional stability in the on-center driving position is made worse because the same slanted king pin angle that produces the turning-lift effect also produces a steer wheel castering effect that greatly adds to the unstable behavior of the steer wheels during crosswind and crowned road driving conditions. It is amazing that the adverse effect of steer wheel castering has failed to be better understood over the many years because of an original misleading choice of terms. It can be reasoned that in the beginning the shorter term, caster angle, was probably chosen over the more complex term, turning-lift angle, considering that the angles were one and the same. For as long as anyone can remember, the standard reference for the required king pin angle in vehicle specification manuals has always been referred to in degrees of caster angle. Therefore, it is not surprising that it has been mistakenly assumed throughout the industry that steer wheel castering in some manner is beneficial to heavy vehicle drivability, when in fact the opposite is true. Over many years, many of the text books and engineering papers that have been written about heavy vehicle steering geometry have repeated the mistaken assumption that castering the steer wheels makes a contribution to the directional stability of heavy over-the-road vehicles. Unfounded theories attempting to explain how the castered wheel functions to make a vehicle directionally stable, have been repeated in various technical publications, greatly adding to the confusion.
It is also amazing how anyone whose desk chair has castered wheels, which allow the chair to move freely in any direction, could believe in some manner that, when applied to a highway vehicle, castering would keep the steer wheels tracking straight. Referring now to prior art FIG. 3, a castered wheel 24 simply follows the lateral movement of a forward pivot axis 25, which is offset horizontally from a vertical axis 23 defining where the wheel 24 contacts a road surface 16. As applied to a highway vehicle, the pivot axis 15 of the slanted king pin 12 slants to intersect the road surface 16 forward of where the steer wheel 13 contacts the road surface as defined by vertical axis 17, creating what is termed “Caster Offset” as illustrated in FIGS. 1 and 3. A castered steer wheel therefore does not prevent lateral movement of a vehicle, which instead is actually guided by any force acting on the vehicle to cause lateral movement of the offset pivot axis 15. Therefore, during crosswind driving, the castered wheels of a heavy vehicle are guided down-wind by the lateral down-wind movements of the vehicle in response to crosswind gusts, thereby requiring repetitive driver steering corrections to maintain directional control of the vehicle. Crosswind driving is probably the most exhausting driving experience that heavy vehicle drivers must frequently endure because of the repetitive driver steering corrections required to keep the vehicle under control. Crosswind driving is therefore one of the major causes of driving fatigue and related heavy vehicle highway safety issues.
Heavy vehicle steer wheel footprint tests have been conducted using highly accurate instrumentation to measure and record steer wheel activity while driving. During the tests, experienced test drivers made a concerted effort to minimize the corrective steering input to only the amount required to maintain directional control. Any test data that was influenced by inadvertent driver over-steer was not used. Most of the test data was recorded at fifty five (55) miles per hour on a non-windy day on a smooth highway. Therefore, the data is considered to represent a best-case scenario.
According to the test data taken at fifty five (55) miles per hour, the left and right driver steering inputs required to correct the unstable behavior of the steer wheels varied from the on-center position thirty-five to forty thousandths (0.035–0.040) of an inch. When the test driver held the steering wheel steady instead of making the left and right steering corrections required to keep the vehicle directionally under control, the vehicle would make an undesired lane change when the steer wheels were off-center by thirty-five thousandths (0.035) of an inch. When the vehicle speed was increased to sixty-five (65) miles per hour, it only required the steer wheels to be directionally off-center fifteen to eighteen (0.015–0.018) thousandths of an inch to make an undesired lane change. During adverse road and wind conditions, the tests also demonstrated that the unstable steer wheel activity increased substantially, requiring a corresponding increase in driver steering inputs to maintain directional control.
The ideal driving situation is therefore one where the steering system inherently causes the vehicle to travel in an unswerving straight line unless the driver intentionally turns the vehicle in another direction. The ideal steering system should therefore require relatively little attention from the driver as the vehicle progresses along a straight line path down the roadway. From a steering standpoint, the vehicle should not respond to anything but the driver's steering commands and these must be of sufficient magnitude to overcome a significant resistance to turning away from center. In the absence of a steering input by the driver, the vehicle should literally do nothing but progress straight ahead.